Those heroic health care workers killed thousands of people to protect themselves from COVID-19.
Last spring, with less known about the disease, doctors often pre-emptively put patients on ventilators or gave powerful sedatives largely abandoned in recent years. The aim was to save the seriously ill and protect hospital staff from Covid-19.
Now hospital treatment for the most critically ill looks more like it did before the pandemic. Doctors hold off longer before placing patients on ventilators. Patients get less powerful sedatives, with doctors checking more frequently to see if they can halt the drugs entirely and dialing back how much air ventilators push into patients’ lungs with each breath.
“Let us go back to basics,” said Dr. Eduardo Oliveira, executive medical director for critical-care services for AdventHealth Central Florida, which recommends its doctors stick with pre-pandemic guidelines for ventilator use. “The less you deviate from it, the better.”
Advances also include new drugs, most notably steroids, for severely ill patients.
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Last spring, doctors put patients on ventilators partly to limit contagion at a time when it was less clear how the virus spread, when protective masks and gowns were in short supply. Doctors could have employed other kinds of breathing support devices that don’t require risky sedation, but early reports suggested patients using them could spray dangerous amounts of virus into the air, said Theodore Iwashyna, a critical-care physician at University of Michigan and Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals in Ann Arbor, Mich.
At the time, he said, doctors and nurses feared the virus would spread through hospitals. “We were intubating sick patients very early. Not for the patients’ benefit, but in order to control the epidemic and to save other patients,” Dr. Iwashyna said “That felt awful.”
Here’s a little secret: most bad diseases are spread through hospitals. And you and your fellow doctors killed thousands of people, Dr. Iwasyna. You should feel awful. You should also have your medical licenses revoked.
Ventilators can injure lungs by causing too much strain as the machines force in air. They deliver air and oxygen through a throat tube, which the body typically fights. “We’ve got gag reflexes that are pretty hard to go away, precisely to avoid things going into our lungs,” Dr. Iwashyna said.
As a safety precaution, doctors and hospitals limited the access of health-care workers to coronavirus patients on ventilators, giving them fewer opportunities to check on them. That meant patients required more powerful sedatives to keep them from pulling out throat tubes. Sedation increases risk for delirium, research suggests, and delirium increases the likelihood of long-term confusion and death.
Subsequent research found the alternative devices to ventilators, such as delivering oxygen through nasal tubes, weren’t as risky to caretakers as believed. Doctors also gained experience with Covid-19 patients, learning to spot signs of who might suddenly turn seriously ill, some said.
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Researchers and doctors continue to study Covid-19 patients who require ventilators, and some experts have called for flexibility from pre-pandemic standards for doctors to decide how to calibrate ventilators. “It’s personalization, that’s the key word,” said John Marini, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. “Guidelines are just guidelines.”
They put them on ventilators, and then just left them alone to suffer and die. In what universe is this a proper standard of care? At least professor Marini could admit that guidelines are just suggestions. Just like the CDC guidelines to wear a mask and maintain social distancing, which aren’t based on science of any kind. So take off that damn mask and live your life.
I encourage you to read the entire article. And stop looking at doctors and nurses as something special. They’re not. They’ll kill you if they think that you will infect them with a disease. As Jordan Schachtel put it:
A significant # of Americans would have fully recovered from COVID, but were robbed of the opportunity to do so bc healthcare workers sent them to their death via ventilator.
Think about that the next time someone tells you how heroic healthcare workers are.
Categories: Coronavirus, Healthcare, Pandemic, Propaganda
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